1. Field of the Invention
An aspect of this disclosure relates to form processing technologies.
2. Description of the Related Art
Definition data defining, for example, process items, process regions, and process information of a form are used to scan and process the form. Technologies for making it easier to update the definition data have been proposed.
For example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2002-298081 discloses a technology that makes it possible to easily generate definition data by combining templates representing definition elements of entry fields. Also, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2001-126010 discloses a technology that makes it possible to simplify and automate a process of generating definition data. In the disclosed technology, box regions surrounded by lines and the properties of the lines are extracted from a form image obtained by scanning a form, characters (or character strings) obtained by character recognition are compared with keywords representing process items and registered in a dictionary, box regions located close to the characters (or character strings) that match the keywords are identified as entry fields, and region information of the identified box regions and the properties of the lines are output according to a predetermined format.
However, with the disclosed technologies, it is difficult to efficiently update definition data.
With the technology disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2002-298081, when the layout of a form is changed, the user needs to select templates to be applied to entry fields of the form. Thus, the disclosed technology requires manual operations to update definition data and therefore does not improve the efficiency of updating definition data. With the technology disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2001-126010, even when the layout of a form is changed only slightly, updating the definition data of the form takes as much time as needed to generate new definition data from the form. Thus, this technology also does not make it possible to efficiently update definition data.